Not-a-Linux distro review: SerenityOS is a Unix-y love letter to the ’90s - Ars Technica
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If this desktop doesn’t look hauntingly familiar to you, you either didn’t live through the 1990s—or perhaps just didn’t live through them right.
Jim Salter
If this desktop doesn’t look hauntingly familiar to you, you either didn’t live through the 1990s—or perhaps just didn’t live through them right.
Jim Salter
SerenityOS’s built-in theme support will, like much of its UI/UX, look instantly familiar to anyone who lived through the 1990s.
Jim Salter
SerenityOS’s built-in theme support will, like much of its UI/UX, look instantly familiar to anyone who lived through the 1990s.
Jim Salter
Here we see SerenityOS’s Windows Explorer-esque file manager and its text editor—which manages to keep looking like Notepad despite Markdown support and two-frame design.
Jim Salter
Here we see SerenityOS’s Windows Explorer-esque file manager and its text editor—which manages to keep looking like Notepad despite Markdown support and two-frame design.
Jim Salter
SerenityOS’s built-in theme support will, like much of its UI/UX, look instantly familiar to anyone who lived through the 1990s.
Jim Salter
Here we see SerenityOS’s Windows Explorer-esque file manager and its text editor—which manages to keep looking like Notepad despite Markdown support and two-frame design.
Jim Salter
SerenityOS’s console and System Monitor apps continue its overarching theme of instantly familiar framework, populated with new and entirely different data.
Jim Salter
If you aren’t unreasonably excited about the idea of a built-in font editor, I’m not sure we can be friends.
Jim Salter
You want Minesweeper? SerenityOS has Minesweeper. Like everything else, it’s a complete rewrite under the hood.
Jim Salter
Today, I test-drove an in-development operating system project that seems almost disturbingly tailored to me specifically: SerenityOS. I cannot possibly introduce SerenityOS more accurately than its own website does:
SerenityOS is a love letter to ’90s user interfaces with a custom Unix-like core. It flatters with sincerity by stealing beautiful ideas from various other systems. Roughly speaking, the goal is a marriage between the aesthetic of late-1990s productivity software and the power-user accessibility of late-2000s *nix. This is a system by us, for us, based on the things we like.
Every word of this introduction is almost surgically accurate. To someone in SerenityOS’s target demographic—someone like myself (and likely many Arsians), who grew up with NT4 systems but matured on modern Linux and BSD—SerenityOS hits like a love letter from the ex you never quite forgot.
SerenityOS isn’t Linux—and it’s not BSD, either
What that brief intro doesn’t get across is the scale of the project. You might think that SerenityOS is just a Linux distro with an unusually ambitious vaporwave aesthetic, but it’s actually an entire operating system built from the ground up. That means custom-built kernel, display manager, shell… everything.
According to founding SerenityOS developer Andreas Kling, there is absolutely no third-party code in SerenityOS. “When we started,” Kling told Ars, “we imported four or five C standard library functions from NetBSD or something like that. But those were gotten rid of over time. We’re free of third-party code now, with the exception of the build process.”
The build process Kling refers to is something you’ll need to get familiar with if you want to test-drive SerenityOS. There aren’t any actual releases at this point, and there’s no ISO file to download. Instead, you’ll need to git clone the project onto your own machine and compile the OS from source. This produces—and automatically runs—a special SerenityOS virtual machine.
Although SerenityOS doesn’t use code from either Linux or BSD under its hood, it does borrow a couple of concepts from FreeBSD—its license (2-clause BSD), and a “ports tree” software management system similar to FreeBSD’s.
There is a catch to SerenityOS’s implementation of the ports tree, though: it does not operate within SerenityOS itself. Instead, the user builds the port on the host operating system, then rebuilds the SerenityOS image to include the freshly built port.
“It’s a Unix system! I know this!”
On the minus side, SerenityOS’s browser threw an exception—on the plus side, that Crash Reporter is a thing of beauty!
Jim Salter
On the minus side, SerenityOS’s browser threw an exception—on the plus side, that Crash Reporter is a thing of...